Most Likely to Succeed: Minnesota Wild

Most likely to Succeed is our newest series which points out one player from every team and explains why that player is poised to increase their point totals. While some teams may have more than one player likely to breakout and some none, we will focus on the ones who actually should improve with a full healthy season. File this article under a sleeper-type but sleepers would not be called that if people saw them coming.

With the Minnesota Wild still in transition and a few years away from their last playoff berth things look slightly bleak. No current pundit expects them to make the playoffs after they switched from a trap and the great Jacques Lemaire to a free wheeling Todd Richards.  This system seems to allow much more offense than before but the team still needs to acquire more skill to actually make the system work.

Of the skilled players, Guillaume Latendresse looks like the most likely to succeed following 25 goals in only 55 games.  More impressively, the former Montreal Canadien mostly played on the second line with offensive dynamos like Andrew Ebbett and James Sheppard.  If he could play with a decent center like new signing Matt Cullen he could possibly even improve from there.

Spread out his goal scoring over a full season and it equals a tidy 38 notches.  Allow for a slight regression mainly because of his monster transition into the Wild system but 30 goals sounds reasonable.  If Latendresse scored a full 38 last year, he would have finished in the top ten.